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W.R. Mead

Life after blue

The secret of Anglo-American civilization has been its ability to combine the two elements of order and liberty at successively higher levels of both. To think constructively about our future we shouldn’t be thinking about a zero sum tradeoff between order and freedom; we should be thinking about how to build the kind of order that extends our liberty in new and important ways.

An example of this thinking might involve new approaches to illegal drugs. As we’ve argued on this site, simply abolishing all drug laws is likely to create serious problems, but the status quo can hardly be called satisfactory. What’s needed isn’t the abolition of all laws about drugs but the creation of a legal, social and regulatory infrastructure that provides for more personal liberty about drugs but guards against certain potential consequences of the wider use of the these drugs: strong penalties for sales to minors, routine drug testing in many jobs, taxes on drug sales to support treatment for addicts, greatly expanded DUI laws and enforcement procedures and a major overhaul of the drug prescription system. There would have to be methods established to test newly created recreational drugs for safety and there would have to be laws aimed at preventing narco-trafficking cartels from dominating the legal drug business. There presumably would be zoning laws to keep drug dispensing retail outlets away from schools. There would be mandatory warning labels and, one suspects, there would still be stiff penalties for violating the restrictions that remained (selling to minors, reselling prescription painkillers, black market sales without paying tax, selling bootleg meth instead of the official, certified stuff and so on).

People would have more freedom to take drugs recreationally than they do now, and there would likely be many fewer people serving jail time for drug offenses, but we might also have more drug laws and a larger enforcement and treatment complex than we do now. The social order would be more complex, but the zone of individual freedom would grow.

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People would have more freedom to take drugs recreationally than they do now, and there would likely be many fewer people serving jail time for drug offenses, but we might also have more drug laws and a larger enforcement and treatment complex than we do now. The social order would be more complex, but the zone of individual freedom would grow.

This is why the supposed benefits of this is garbage. It will be more costly to regulate this, and enforce those regulations, then to keep it illegal. It will far outweigh any taxes collected the same way liquor taxes don’t even approach covering the costs due to their legal use.

Walter, wake up Walter. You’ve been dreaming. After we’ve demonized tobacco and taxed it nearly out of existence you want to legalize meth? We don’t have enough problems with alcohol so we should legalize drugs because we can tax them?
The country is in the grip of socialism, smothered by government obstruction and regulation with wildly out of control spending that will doom the nation as surely as night follows day.
Our liberal elite not only will not work to solve the problems, they won’t admit that there is a problem. FORWARD!
Have some coffee and try again.

The secret of Anglo-American civilization has been its ability to combine the two elements of order and liberty at successively higher levels of both. To think constructively about our future we shouldn’t be thinking about a zero sum tradeoff between order and freedom; we should be thinking about how to build the kind of order that extends our liberty in new and important ways.

Congratulations! You’ve completely misunderstood liberty. The Freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, the ones we think of as fundamental rights, are freedoms of action. Freedom of assembly, speech, press, religion, bearing arms, etc. are all actions about which, “Congress shall make no law”.

The order you speak of derives from Government control, which provides not Freedom of something, but freedom from something. That “order” that lets you drive 65 mph down the highway in a western democracy, while you can’t in a “state of nature”, exists because the government has restricted the actions of others. How can they be more free, when their actions are restricted? Is freedom defined as the right to act, or nor act, as one sees fit? or is it to be free from the repurcussions of anyones’ (yours or others) actions?

One path leads to a maximization of Individual Liberty, while the other arrives at surrender to the collective. Anyone who wasn’t living under a rock in the 20th century should know that we want head more towards one side than the other, but the idea that we become more free when our actions are restricted isn’t just counter intuitive, it’s wrong.

To think constructively about our future we shouldn’t be thinking about a zero sum tradeoff between order and freedom; we should be thinking about how to build the kind of order that extends our liberty in new and important ways.

At the heart of the enduring liberal ideal is a truth that is often forgotten in today’s political debates: the relationship between order and liberty does not have to be zero sum. More government can mean less freedom, and more freedom can mean less government—but things don’t always work out that way.

But since people who seek power tend to be pathological power-seekers, the natural tendency of government is always, to some degree, to increase in size, cost, and power, always at the cost of the citizenry’s welfare, wealth, and freedom. Plato knew it when he wrote The Republic, Saint Thomas More knew it when he wrote Utopia (although the concept was addressed to a much lesser extent in the latter), and the founding fathers, likely familiar with both works, understood it when they devised the system of government we precariously live under to this day.

It’s not a zero sum game, sure, but until we devise a foolproof method to chase away people who would seek power for power’s sake, and thus have complete trust in our elected officials, the tendency of government is, unequivocally, to strip liberty from the citizenry until they are but subjects. Thing is, this “foolproof method” is theoretical at best. The Communists thought they had it figured out, only to find that in very short order, they were the tools and serfs of those clever enough to use the ignorant masses to secure their own power.